Books In Review

Cultures in Conflict

Since Long Before 1492

Cultures in Conflict: Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Age
of Discovery. By Bernard Lewis. Oxford University Press.
101 pp. $16.96.

Reviewed by Robert Royal

Karl von Hapsburg, one of the heirs to the old Austro-Hungarian throne
and a member of the European Parliament, is fond of telling a story
about the deep connections between religion, politics, and history.
While he was visiting one of the troubled fractions of the former
Yugoslavia, the local bishop was abducted for a few hours, but released
later the same day to a Franciscan monastery where von Hapsburg was
staying. This puzzled him, and he asked one of the monks why the
abduction had occurred. "Well," the monk began, "it all started in 1523
. . ."

Bernard Lewis' Cultures in Conflict: Christians, Muslims, and Jews
in the Age of Discovery reminds us that many current questions have
ancient roots. In fact, the conflicts Lewis examines were already eight
hundred years old by the time the Age of Discovery began in 1492.
Islamic conquerors had spread out of Arabia and acrosss Palestine, North
Africa, and much of Spain by 711, less than a century after Muhammad's
birth. The relations of Christians, Jews, and Muslims around the
Mediterranean were tumultuous for centuries, and still have
consequences-in the Balkans, for instance-that we need to understand if
we are to cope with politics and conflict today.

Because of the contemporary dominance of the West, many people
anachronistically read back into the conflicts of the age of exploration
a European preeminence that did not exist. Lewis, perhaps the most
distinguished Arabist in the English-speaking world, shows how, on the
contrary, it was Muslim cultural and military power that seemed
ascendant both earlier and later, with a few exceptions. The Christian
Crusades to retake the Holy Land from the eleventh to the thirteenth
centuries failed. Muslims captured thousand-year-old Christian Byzantium
in 1453, not only posing a military threat in the Eastern Mediterranean
but necessitating new trade routes to the Far East. Muslim raiders
approached Venice in Northern Italy, and even captured Otranto in the
South of Italy during the 1480s, while Barbary pirates carried on a
"naval jihad" as far as the British Isles and Iceland.

Although in 1492 the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella took
Granada, the last Muslim stronghold in Spain, they still faced a long
struggle that involved the pacification, conversion, and expulsion of
their large Muslim population. Other Muslim forces were far from dead
after 1492. The Moroccans dealt the Portuguese a severe blow in the 1578
Battle of the Three Kings. And it was not until 1683 that the second
Turkish retreat from the siege of Vienna limited the Muslim presence in
Europe to Turkey and the Balkans. Other outcomes, far less favorable to
Christian nations, had been quite possible-as the Europeans of the time
knew well.

Lewis remarks that Christianity and Islam were similar in their belief
in a universal missionary purpose and in their drive toward military
dominance. The civilizations of China, India, and the Americas were
quite sophisticated and advanced, he says, but regional. When Buddhism
lost its missionary fervor, Christianity and Islam were the only
remaining religious movements with global aspirations. For much of the
Middle Ages, Islam-which was far more advanced than Christian Europe-
seemed the likely successor to classical civilization. Yet for not
wholly understood reasons, Christian Europe was to show a global thrust
and transcultural curiosity (along with a large dollop of outright
greed) that led to its worldwide dominance.

Medieval Jews were in a far different position. In Europe and throughout
the Muslim world, Jews at the time posed little political and military
challenge to either power. They did, however, pose a theological,
intellectual, and legal one. In the "Dark Ages" (darker in Europe than
in the Islamic world), Jews were generally tolerated in both Christian
and Muslim states. It was largely as the Muslim threat rose and Crusades
were undertaken during the High Middle Ages and the Age of Exploration
that Christians included Jews in the efforts they were making against
external Muslim opponents. Jews were expelled from England, France,
Naples and other cities, and, notoriously, from Spain in 1492. Many fled
to North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean where Muslim rulers
regarded them as reliable economic and political allies.

Lewis examines little-known Arabic sources to arrive at a remarkable
picture of the way Christians and Muslims looked at one another. Despite
their mutual hostility, they understood each other's views rather well.
Muslim theology was largely dismissed by medieval Christians as post-
Gospel heresy; but the Muslims themselves were regarded as serious
social and military challengers. By contrast, a still primitive
Christendom looked to sophisticated Muslims "rather as Central Asia or
Africa appeared to Victorian En-glishmen."

By 1492, Christians were powerful and sophisticated enough to defeat the
Muslims in the Iberian peninsula, but Spain faced a complex problem.
Like the Jesuits in Elizabethan England, moriscos (converted
Muslims) and marranos (converted Jews) in Spain were both a
religious and a political threat. Not only were they suspected of being
crypto-infidels, they were also "suspected of complicity with the Muslim
powers." Nonetheless, their treatment was not uniformly harsh. Just
prior to the government's 1609 decision to expel all the
moriscos, for example, the bishops of Spain refused a
collective condemnation of them and urged efforts at real conversion.
The choice between conversion or death may not seem very appealing to
modern eyes, but under the circumstances it reflected not entirely
unfounded fears.

Lewis is impartial in describing this history. Yet he takes some odd
positions. He argues that Islam was the first universal, multiracial,
multiethnic religion. But after asserting this and describing
Christianity as, until 1492, an essentially European faith, he goes on
to describe how the "vast majority" of Muslim converts in the Middle
East, North Africa, Spain, and Sicily came from Christianity. This is
all the more puzzling since he rightly points out that the Crusades, far
from being an early attempt at European imperialism, would be better
understood as, in the mentality of the time, a kind of
reconquista, similar to the recapture of Spain and Sicily in
Western Europe and Ivan the Great's throwing off the "Tatar yoke" in
Eastern Europe.

The crusade, a long-delayed Christian response
to the jihad, was an attempt to recover by holy war
what had been lost by holy war, and what could be more
important for Christians than the Christian Holy Land, lost
by the Byzantine emperors to the Muslim caliphs in the
seventh century?

The obvious implication is that Christianity, from its first movements
out of Palestine to Greece, Rome, and the northern and southern shores
of the Mediterranean, was itself a multiracial, multiethnic, universal
movement.

Unlike many others who have tried to tell this tale, however, Lewis does
not indulge in facile castigation of the West or try to pretend that all
cultures are equal in the multicultural dispensation. After a
sympathetic treatment of all three faiths, in his closing pages he comes
down squarely in favor of Western culture: "In setting out to conquer,
subjugate, and despoil other peoples, the Europeans were merely
following the example set them by their neighbors and predecessors and,
indeed, conforming to the common practice of mankind. . . . The
interesting questions are not why they tried, but why they succeeded and
why, having succeeded, they repented of their success as of a sin. The
success was unique in modern times, the repentance, in all of human
history."

In that light, multiculturalism itself reveals itself to be very
Western. For Lewis, "The special combination of unconstrained curiosity
concerning the Other and unforced respect for his otherness remains a
distinctive feature of Western and Westernized cultures and is still
regarded with bafflement and anger by those who neither share nor
understand it." If the West "goes," he concludes, imperialism, sexism,
and racism (three words of Western coinage) will not also "go." Rather
the power to criticize them will disappear and the world will be
impoverished and endangered as a result-a lesson a truer knowledge of
history and the Other might teach self-critical Westerners.

Robert Roval is Vice President and John M. Olin Fellow at the Ethics
and Public Policy Center. He is the author of 1492 and All That:
Political Manipulations of History.